News

If Marsha Mailick is at all intimidated by the prospect of taking on one of the hardest jobs on the UW-Madison campus, there is no hint of it in her demeanor, as she navigates the familiar territory of Bascom Hall.

Instead, Mailick is all business, anxious to hit the ground running, get her team in place and accelerate the momentum of thirteen years of steady leadership conferred by her predecessor, Martin Cadwallader. This week, Mailick assumes the role of interim vice chancellor for research and graduate education in the newly restructured research and graduate education environment on the UW-Madison campus.

As UW-Madison’s research and graduate education programs begin an historic transition, there will be many familiar faces and a few new ones on the third floor of Bascom Hall.

This month, a new administrative structure begins to take shape as the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and the Graduate School become distinct, but intimately connected entities. The change, years in the making, is intended to optimize and enhance the administrative engine that governs one of the world’s largest and most diverse academic programs of research and graduate education, explains Marsha Mailick, interim vice chancellor for research and graduate education.

Social work professor Betty Kramer has been named the incoming director of the Part-Time MSW Program at the School of Social Work.

“I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to direct the University of Wisconsin-Madison Part-Time MSW Program which makes it possible for good-hearted and hard-working individuals with rich professional experiences to fulfill their dreams for higher education,” Kramer stated.

Kramer, a first generation college graduate, is a strong advocate that graduate social work education should be accessible to anyone who aspires to make the world a more humane, safe, socially just and compassionate place to live....

One of the School’s most popular courses, Course 275: Making a Difference: Professions That Change The World, will get a makeover from SSW professor Stephanie Robert, who will be taking over the course this fall.

Course 275 is intended to expose students to ideas and perspectives that will hopefully inspire them to make a difference in the world, according to Robert.

“I aim to help students examine the complex causes of social problems and why there are often no easy solutions,” Robert said. “Then I introduce the different ways to address social problems from different professions and disciplines.”

In rural Washington State, a local restaurant owner, who runs the kind of place where retirees linger over scrambled eggs and parents feed their children hamburgers, proudly told Anna Haley-Lock, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, how he avoided overpaying his workers. He set a rule that labor costs could equal no more than twenty-one per cent of sales each day; about half of that sum could be spent on front-of-the-house staff, and half on those in the back. Every half hour, the owner and his managers review an Excel spreadsheet with the latest totals. “The labor percentage can’t exceed twenty-nine per cent at three P.M., or it’s unlikely to drop to twenty-one per cent” by the end of the day, the owner told Haley-Lock. “At that point, managers know to ask some folks to go home.”

With his clunky spreadsheet, the restaurant owner was improvising a version of the software that large chains use to schedule employees at strict intervals, and to end their shifts when business slows. The effects of unpredictable hours are rippling through workers’ lives and damping the overall economy....